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Chapter 6: I Am a Cross to You

That’s why I say the pill is one of the greatest revolutions in the world because it has completely changed the whole concept of love. Now one can love only for joy. There is no need to be under the biological slavery, there is no need to make love only when you want a child. Now sex and love are completely separated. The pill has made the greatest revolution: now sex is sex and love is love. Sex is when it is biological; love is when it is simply a beautiful music of two bodies meeting, engulfing each other, disappearing into each other, losing into each other, falling into a totally new dimension of rhythm, harmony.an orgasmic experience. No problem of the children, no biological push-pull, nothing. Now the act in itself is beautiful, no more a means towards any end - that is the difference. Work is when it is a means to some end. Play is when the end and the means are together. Play is when the means itself is the end - there is no other end to it.

Eat for the joy of it, then you are man, human, a higher being. Love for the joy of love, then you are man, a higher being. Listen for the joy of listening and you will be freed from the confinement of instincts.

I am not against happiness, I am all for it. I am a hedonist, and this is my understanding: that all the great spiritual people of the world have always been hedonists. If somebody is not a hedonist and pretends to be a spiritual person, he is not - then he is a psychopath. Because happiness is the very goal, the very source, the very end of all things. God is seeking happiness through you, in millions of forms. Allow him all the happiness that is possible and help him to go to higher peaks, higher reaches, of happiness. Then you are religious, and then your temples will become places of celebration and your churches will not be so sad and ugly, so somber, so dead, like graveyards. Then there will be laughter and there will be song and there will be dance and there will be great rejoicing.

Religion has suffered very much because of these people who have been teaching self-torture. Religion has to be freed from all this nonsense. Great rubbish has become attached to religion. The essential religion is nothing but joy. So whatsoever gives you joy is virtuous; whatsoever makes you sad, unhappy, miserable is a sin. Let that be the criterion.

And I don’t give you rigid rules because I know how the human mind functions. Once a rigid rule is given, you forget awareness and you start following the rigid rule. A rigid rule is not the question - you can follow the rule and you will never grow.

Listen to a few anecdotes:

Benny arrived home to find the kitchen a mess of broken crockery.

“What happened?” he asked his wife.

“There’s something wrong with this cookbook’ she explained. ‘It says that an old cup without a handle will do for the measuring - and it’s taken me eleven tries to get a handle off without breaking the cup.”

Now if the cookbook says that, it has to be done. Human mind is foolish - remember it. Once you have a rigid rule, you follow it.

The mob was meeting the big guy, and what the big guy said, went. The buzzer rang and the servant went over to answer the door. He peeked through the slot in the frame, and, recognizing the visitor, allowed the panel to swing back.